For all kinds of reasons, not the least of which was the fact that they chucked their 9-to-5 lives into giant-sized zeitgeistian dumpster just off Divison Street in Chicago and then went all in on a musical life that included Sal Paradisian-type cross-continental tours that they initially ran on a shoestring out of the back of their shelf-contained Honda Element.

Well, that and the fact that they made and executed killer tunes like....This.

Anyway...

About a year or so ago they relocated from the West Coast to the Washington DC area, went into hibernation for a bit, and then re-emerged as a whole new entity with a much heavier electrified sound that still holds together melodically.

That's them with their longtime collaborator Ben Tufts on drums, above, now known as 'Fuzzqueen', live, at the top of the post.

It's very cool stuff, and the studio recordings are starting to emerge.

_____And, for the record, it was Ms. Shevaughn (Erin Frisby) who coined the phrase on the masthead at the top of this here little F-Troop list blog...Her partner, the artist and pedal freak formally known as Yuma Wray, is actually Chris Stelloh.It never, ever, ceases to amaze me how much great music there is out there, just over the horizon, that is so easy to find and enjoy these days...It's a boon to punters and obsessives like myself but it sure must make it tough for all these folks to make a living at it...

Wednesday, August 30, 2017

And it looks like that weather personage is neither Global's Mark Madryga nor the MoCo's Joanna Wagstaffe.

Instead, the wind whisperer of choice appears to be a new government.

Case in point...

The latest cannonading bit of column making from the good Mr. Baldrey in the Black Press, ostensibly about why the Dipper's toll removal strategy was a winning bit of retail politicking, starts like this:

There were two reminders on display last week of why the NDP is in power in this province and the B.C. Liberals are not.

First came the official confirmation by the auditor general that the last fiscal year ran up a huge $2.7 billion surplus. That’s right: “billion.”

Then came the NDP government making good on a key – perhaps “the” key – election promise by scrapping the tolls on two Metro Vancouver bridges by the end of this month...

And then later, deep in the middle of the piece before he returns to his toll kicker, Mr. Baldrey buries his real lede:

...The B.C. Liberals were more than happy to simply allow the $2.7 billion to be applied to the province’s direct debt, as if that was what voters were clamouring for more than anything else. Funny, I don’t remember anyone, anywhere, in that election campaign, demanding that the direct debt be paid down as the top priority facing the province.

Rather than provide help for those struggling to keep pace with the high costs associated with living in Metro Vancouver, the B.C. Liberals repeated their mantra that “if the economy grows all will be well” and that creating a job was the end-all and be-all of a government’s responsibilities.

But the economy is growing faster than anywhere in Canada and this province has the lowest unemployment rate in the country.

And yet the affordability situation remains profound: there is a rental crisis, a homeownership crisis, a mass of people living well below the poverty line, overcrowded transit, high tuition fees, an underfunded education system … the list goes on.

Yet none of that massive $2.7-billion surplus was spent on trying to solve some of those problems. Instead it was applied to paying down a particular and somewhat abstract portion of the province’s debt (which, overall, continues to climb).

In retrospect, I’m sure the B.C. Liberals are realizing what an obtuse, out-of-touch choice they made...

Gosh.

Don't know about you, but I, for one, don't recall Mr. Baldrey driving that last bit home with his audience anytime before the wind changed on May 9th.

Tuesday, August 29, 2017

It came off the bat of then Schmindian Duane Kuiper 40 years ago today:

It was the only dinger of Mr. Kuiper's career.

A career that, while neither truly long nor truly distinguished, was solid enough to keep him in the big leagues for nine seasons and more than three thousand at bats.

Which means his was and still is the worst home run-to-at-bat ratio of all time.

See....

More famous that summer than the death of Elvis!

_______Hmmmmm....What was I doing that summer?...Well, when I wasn't trying to figure out what made Peter Frampton so popular, exactly, I was arguing with my friends about why the Ramones must, secretly, be British...Clearly, by then I should have been paying way more attention to the writing of Lester Bangs...Speaking of the good Mr. Bangs, he, himself, wrote a killer obit of the King published on the same day the Kuiper hit his pop-gun shot into the empty right field bleachers of the old Mistake-by-the-Lake in Cleveland..

There is no sweeter time of year for those perennially convinced of government’s greed and bloat than the release of the Fraser Institute’s annual Canadian Consumer Tax Index, which never lets the truth get in the way of a bit of anti-tax panic.

The numbers are again eye-popping. According to the authors, the tax bill of the average Canadian family has increased by a whopping 2,006 per cent since 1961. We now pay more in taxes than we do on housing, food and clothing combined, the report gasps, as it does every year.

As ever, however, the scandal the report purports to uncover would seem far less scandalous if only the numbers used were not so distorted and out of any context.

To take a few egregious examples: the report doesn’t account for inflation. It includes corporate taxes in the average family’s tax bill, though these are largely shouldered by richer Canadians. It presents the mean family as the typical one, though the median family, which earns less and thus pays less in taxes, would be more appropriate....

{snip}

...The study’s greatest failing, however – the omission that ultimately renders its statistics meaningless – is that it makes no mention whatsoever of what we get in return for our tax money. Nowhere does the report mention “public services” or “programs,” nowhere “roads” or “schools.” It’s true that taxes as a percentage of our income have risen over the last 56 years, by around 7 per cent, but consider what they have bought: medicare, for instance, and the Canada Pension Plan, to name just two programs established after their baseline year of 1961...

British Columbia will re-establish a human rights commission to fight inequality and discrimination in all its forms, Premier John Horgan announced today.

“Every person deserves to be treated with dignity and respect. By re-establishing a human rights commission, we will create a more-inclusive and just society, where we work together to eliminate inequality and prevent discrimination on the basis of race, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity and gender expression,” said Premier Horgan....

But...

When I notice something that appears to be easily fixable that will, when fixed, support the core values of a progressive government, I have no plans to simultaneously duck and mindlessly cheerlead.

For all kinds of reasons, including the fact that I am convinced that that kind of behaviour by all sorts of well meaning rank-and-file (l)iberals let the governments of Mr. Campbell and Ms. Clark off-the-hook so that they could run seriously amok for sixteen long years.

OK?

_____What brought this on?....Well, after reading the opinions of folks like Laila Yuile and Delphine Charmley, I took to the Twittmachine and said that we should give the disabled back their bus passes like, yesterday, and roll out the bigger, more comprehensive fixes down the road..Not everyone of Dipper bent thought we should be doing that sort of thing.And as for a citizenry pushing a government to do the right thing....Well, apparently even a reluctant progressive like FDR actually thought it was a good thing...At least some of the time....Maybe.

...Merv was more than a good citizen…he was exceptionally engaged even before he began writing about issues that troubled and concerned him. He followed all our blogs, commented and emailed and early on I think we all knew he would be a great blogger too. I encouraged him. Norm encouraged him. Pretty sure RossK did too! And eventually he did, and never looked back. We needed more lights to shine and his was bright-his words concise and pointed. His natural curiosity and sense of outrage for a clear lack of integrity displayed and fostered by the Clark government led to keen observations.

Yet at the heart of it.. and what called to me in his writing…was a heartfelt desire to see goodness done, to make this province a better place for everyone, and to hopefully fill a void lacking in public commentary...

...Merv didn’t have much desire for personal recognition but would have appreciated John Horgan’s words. He hoped – no, expected – that many of the issues he thought important would be addressed by the Premier’s new Government.

I’m hopeful that writers and readers in the online world of BC politics will find a suitable way to remember and celebrate Merv Adey. He took a serious interest in improving political reporting and perhaps a bursary or award in Merv’s name to a worthy student of journalism would be appropriate.

...It took one man, one friend....one tireless fighter to have the BC Liberal governments false ads on LNG pulled, Merv Adey was a relentless battler on so many fronts, Merv made a difference in our last election, he made a difference in our mad world, Mr Adey made a difference to his family and to me..

You make us proud......and you set an awfully high bar for those you left behind...

****

I had many off-line conversations with Merv - about things like data, stories, strategy and guitar playing.

Speaking to him was always a joy.

And when I gave him a little bit of information on immune checkpoint inhibitors, which he was researching because of his own health situation, everything came down to his family given the potential monetary costs that he refused to burden them with.

He really was a helluva guy.

As for that second phrase in the title to this post, you can find a version of it in this interpretation of Astral Weeks by Glen Hansard and his trusty sidekick Joe Doyle on the stand-up bass...

Despite the histrionics I'm pretty sure Merv would approve.

OK?

_________You can read and re-read all of Merv's stuff over at his place....Here.

...Trump’s campaign of bigotry, taken as a licence to hate by every racist and fascist, was no grubby disruption of a tolerant American consensus. “Obama answers to the Qur’an before the constitution,” declared Fox News contributors. The US constitution would be replaced with the Qur’an, they announced. Muslims would be banned from serving in high office, declared Herman Cain, a Republican candidate for the presidential nomination, a few years ago. “Sharia is a mortal threat to the survival of freedom in the United States,” was the pronouncement of Newt Gingrich, the Republican ex-speaker of the House of Representatives. Muslims were the only group Barack Obama offered “undying, unfailing support for”, declared fellow Republican Mike Huckabee...

Of course, the same faux-media envelope pushing playbook b/w xenophobic right-sided political rhetoric was exported north of the border as well.

Luckily, it was NOT a winning combination last time around.

Furthermore, in Canada at least, the lashing back has ultimately led to this...

Personally, I'm not so sure about the esteemed Mr. Baldrey's take on this one.

After all, is it really going to be bad for Dipper fortunes if the specifics of all that the good Mr. Wilson did (and did not do) for the people of British Columbia during his recent sinecure is raised, over and over and over and over again, in the public prints and 'lectronic media outlets for the next few weeks and months.

Friday, August 18, 2017

...Mr. Bannon had made clear to allies after the American Prospect interview that he expected to be back soon at the right-wing website Breitbart.com that he had steered before joining Mr. Trump’s campaign. He had dinner in New York City on Wednesday night with Robert Mercer, the hedge fund billionaire who is also Mr. Bannon’s chief patron, to discuss the future, according to a person briefed on the discussions...

Hmmmmm....

If that doesn't work out one can only wonder if Mr. Bannon will, perhaps, turn his lonely eyes north in the direction of the good Mr. Levant.

Wednesday, August 16, 2017

I remember seeing this picture of a young Lew Alcindor when I was a kid.

At that time I was rabid for all things basketball.

So much so that my friend Danny M. and I actually joined a church just so we could play on their team and, more importantly, acquire a key to their gym.

Anyway...

Even back then I was skeptical that a young superstar like Alcindor (who by the time I first saw the picture above had already crushed the NCAA while at UCLA with John Wooden, won an NBA championship with the Milwaukee Bucks, and changed his name to Kareem Abdul Jabbar) was ever as truly thoughtful as the kid in the picture above appeared to be back when he was riding the subway in his high school letterman's jacket.

Well, for the record, in this case at least, my skepticism was misplaced.

How do I know I was wrong?

Because I listened to Mr. Jabbar talk to Marc Maron for an hour or so yesterday.

It's an enlightening conversation on a whole lot of levels, not the least of which is the fact that there is no discussion whatsoever of career statistics, et cetera.

________And, slightly tangentially to the topic....I find it most interesting that a small clutch of Canadian media types who have long associated themselves with hate mongers are now suddenly surprised to learn that such mongering actually begets hate...Sheesh.

Monday, August 07, 2017

I spent a chunk of Saturday working on the real thing, analyzing populations of tumor infiltrating cells by flow cytometry. It's a workhorse tool of immunologists that lets you characterize immune cells based on various physical characteristics and molecular markers. Not my favourite way to go given that I've spent most of my career assessing phenotypes based on what cells actually do rather than using somewhat fungible, and sometimes capricious markers - still, it's powerful and we're working with folks who really know what they're doing on the project.

This afternoon was different though. All catch-up and paper-worky given that it is the season for reference letter writing, lecture prepping, and getting various and assorted registrational and CV-type bits done in advance of the grant writing season to come.

________And do not cry for me Argentina because I really like my job...The real thing is best, of course, but the other stuff isn't so bad either...The upshot - on average I get to spend at least half of my time on the real thing all of which is stuff that we as a research group have chosen to chase...Can't complain about that.Oh, and in case you were wondering....Ever since I was a kid I've had this thing that one of my best friends dubbed 'two-track'...It allows me to pay pretty close attention and be absorbed by two different tasks at once...Got me out of many a jam in school when a teacher thought I was goofing off...I was, of course, (goofing off I mean) but was often also simultaneously paying attention...Has been known to drive my kids crazy though.

Friday, August 04, 2017

We may never know if there were darker forces behind Christy Clark’s surprising decision to resign, effective this Friday, as both Liberal leader and MLA. So absent any titillating information to the contrary, we are left to accept the explanation she is now offering up for her swift and sudden departure...

{snip}

...While the majority of the caucus stood behind her, Ms. Clark, as savvy a political operator as they come, could sense trouble on the horizon, especially the longer the NDP was able to govern. She said she took a “walk along the water” last Thursday evening and along the way “my head caught up with my heart.” The next morning she informed her caucus of her decision...

In the 'Non-Club' corner, Mr. Mackin, of the Lance of the Free:...“I talked to the caucus the day before [her July 28 resignation], I asked them all, did they want me to stay, did they want me to go?” Clark said July 31 in Vancouver. “Every single person in the room asked me to stay.”

That is not the way it went down, according to two independent sources intimately familiar with the caucus retreat at the Penticton Lakeside Resort. Clark chose to quit instead of being dumped...

{snip}

...The sources told theBreaker that, during the retreat, Abbotsford South MLA Darryl Plecas demanded a review of Clark’s leadership. He even threatened to quit caucus and sit as an independent when the Legislature reopens this fall.

Plecas was not alone in the release of pent-up anger directed at Clark. Of the prevailing mood at the retreat, one of the sources said bluntly: “It was really ugly.” ...

...The NDP is billing the event as the “Leader’s Golf Tournament” and inviting people to join (Premier John) Horgan and “MLA Rob Fleming” for a round of golf and a dinner reception on Thursday, Aug. 24.

The NDP is charging $2,000 for a foursome of golfers and confirmed Thursday that the event will operate under “existing rules” — meaning that corporations and unions are free to buy tickets...

{snip}

...Fleming said the government will follow through on its promise to prohibit union and corporate donations once the legislature resumes sitting in September.

“We’re going to ban them at the first legislative opportunity and that’s in the fall,” he said.

In the meantime, the golf tournament will operate under existing rules, he said.

“I’ve had golf tournaments for years. I think this is the 10th annual. The price is the same. The time of year is the same, and we’ll continue to have golf and other fundraising events under the new rules because they’re fun and they’re open to the public.”

A financial report on the Elections B.C. website shows that the NDP charged $500 a ticket for a Leader’s Tournament last September, pulling in $32,000 from organizations. Once costs and other sales were tabulated, the NDP made nearly $22,000...

...Another person apparently getting pressure to consider it is Gary Collins, the former finance minister under Gordon Campbell. (Mr. Collins is related to a Globe and Mail staff member, who was not involved in this piece.)

Mr. Collins, who was in government from 1991 to 2004, has worked in the private sector since retiring from politics and would be a strong contender should he decide to take the plunge...

Gosh.

I think Mr. Mason my have left out a couple of details there.

Specifically, why, exactly, did the good Mr. Collins step down from the Golden Era government of Gordon Campbell in 2004?

Why might those two specific bits of missing information matter to British Columbians who are interested in a more complete description of the track record of a very fine former politician who could, potentially, become a future leader of a major political party in this province?

....Former RailGate era Finance Minister Gary Collins once worked for David Ho's now defunct Harmony Airways.

....Current Deputy Finance Minister Graham Whitmarsh, who helped Deputy AG David Loukidelis put together the super-secret $6 million dollar plea-copping bonus-baby deal that ensured that former Minister Collins would never have to testify, under oath, in front of transcripts of RCMP surveillance wiretaps, at the RailGate trial, also worked for Harmony back in the day.

But here's something we didn't know, courtesy of Sean Holman's (still!)fantastic archives over at Public Eye.....

.....Current Deputy Finance Minister Whitmarsh was 'relieved' of his duties at Harmony on Nov. 30th 2006.

....Former RailGate era Finance Minister Collins resigned from Harmony just one day later on Dec. 01 2006...

At her 'last press conference' yesterday, Ms. Christy Clark was asked the following about Linda Kayfish, Rod MacIsaac's sister:

Reporter: “Are you going to reach out to her again before you leave at the end of the week?”

CClark: “I have asked her for meetings several times, but she hasn’t accepted.”

Marcella Bernardo of CKWX/1130 followed up and went straight to Ms. Kayfish for comment:

...However, Kayfish says she has no record of Clark or anyone from her staff reaching out to her. “No. There’s no messages. I was actually astonished that she said the things they did. I would like to know if we could do an FOI to see all of the times they tried to reach out.”...